


and you should be so lucky

by xymera



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types, Wiedźmin | The Witcher Series - Andrzej Sapkowski
Genre: Aretuza (The Witcher), Canon-Typical Behavior, Character Study, Childhood Trauma, F/F, Gen, I shook a sorceress and intergenerational trauma fell out, Morally Ambiguous Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 14:35:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29761128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xymera/pseuds/xymera
Summary: Five sorceresses, five Ascensions, and the things that were bartered along the way.
Relationships: Triss Merigold/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 4
Kudos: 11





	and you should be so lucky

**Author's Note:**

> content note: canon-typical ableism, both internalized and systemic; implied descriptions of chronic illness; implied descriptions of the gore which accompanies the Ascension; lots of crappy sorceress-typical childhoods.

**i. Sabrina**

Sabrina is about to ruin the rectoress’s entire day.

She isn’t particularly sorry. That wretched woman has made her wear teal flour-sacks for the past four years. The colour’s too bright for her. The cut flatters precisely no-one. An indignity of this magnitude cries out for vengeance.

(And really, if graduates of Aretuza are expected to enter the world as fashionable, sophisticated creatures, shouldn’t those skills be practiced at school? Not by Sabrina, of course; she has exquisite taste already. But that can’t be said of most.)

She marches into Tissaia’s office at the assigned time. Her face rearranges into something pleasant and patient while Madam Rectoress drones on about the delicate equilibrium of beauty and chaos. Finally, when Tissaia’s worn herself out, Sabrina pounces.

“I’d like excellent tits.”

“I beg your _pardon_?” Tissaia says, in a tone that suggests an utter lack of familiarity with both begging and pardons. Her mouth twists in refined disapproval.

“I’m already beautiful. But, as someone likes to say, there’s always room for improvement.” She smirks. She can’t help it. Those famous scales of power are finally tilting in her favour. “And thus: excellent tits.”

“That is your only wish, Miss Glevissig?”

“Is there anything else that needs fixing?” Sabrina gestures to herself from throat to navel. “I think not.”

“I will note that down in full,” Tissaia says. There’s something ominous in her phrasing, as if the simplicity of the request betrays a crudeness of the mind. Sabrina finds that she does not care.

-

It’s not often that Sabrina forgives being upstaged. Or Yennefer, for that matter. At the ball following her Ascension, wearing a gown that her mother—gods torment her—would loathe, she finds that she’s quite willing to do both.

As Yennefer’s beauty and very little else erase years of scheming in an hour, Sabrina glances at Tissaia. _You see_ , she thinks pointedly enough for the rectoress to hear, _I’ve chosen my tools well._

The King of Kaedwen asks her to dance. She smiles at him, a honey-sweet thing edged with a playful flick of lashes. He stumbles and she takes note.

Beneath the rose-petal curve of her lips, Sabrina’s teeth gleam.

* * *

**ii. Triss**

Triss is dying.

Oh, she won’t expire where she sits on this dormitory floor, but give her a year. Maybe three, at the outside. She’s already cheated the hourglass. The family curse devours children and she’s nearly fourteen. It’s an old fear, a weight more than a dangling blade.

She tries to explain all of that through her coughing, but her throat constricts around the words. Her roommate—a pointy, pretty girl named Keira—considers the situation and begins pounding her on the back. Her fists are surprisingly sturdy for such a little thing.

It helps, eventually. Triss’s spine will be spattered with bruises tomorrow.

“Sorry,” she manages to wheeze at last, frantically tidying her mouth. “Curse.”

“Really? What kind?” Keira plonks herself down in front of her, eyes round. _Gods_ , Triss thinks, jealous beyond measure. _She’s not scared of anything_ _at all_.

She makes her way through the whole, miserable story. That every generation of her family produces at least one baby who gasps as if drowning. That no potion or healer they can afford helps. That the child inevitably dies and another is born to replace them, equally afflicted.

“That isn’t a curse, dummy. It’s probably a hereditary illness,” Keira says firmly. “I bet I can diagnose it.”

They’re enrolled in a magic school. The walls around them thrum with a lattice of enchantments. And Keira treats it all with the skepticism of a merchant receiving a two-headed coin. Triss wishes she were like that: tougher and cleverer, not measuring her life in stolen moments.

“I—um. Thank you?” she offers.

“Come on. Library.” Keira tugs her up off the floor.

-  
  


After her Ascension, Triss is told that her body doesn’t tolerate potions well. That keeping her unconscious and still was an ordeal and will be again, should she need that sort of thing. Everyone’s terribly sorry that she woke up before they could clean her off.

_That’s why you cried so much, isn’t it, poor thing? Seeing yourself painted with gore from collarbone to hip isn’t pleasant, particularly for someone of your constitution—_

Triss nods and smiles decorously and apologizes for her overwhelmed, newborn tears. Her dark, blood-damp curls cling to her shoulders and she runs her fingers through them, impatient. Let the gossips call her fragile and affected. _Fuck them_ , she thinks with a wildness that she borrowed from Keira and intends to keep. _I get to fucking live._

* * *

  
  
**iii. Tissaia**

Tissaia doesn’t resemble her mother, gods be thanked.

The elder Lady de Vries was a tall, elegant woman with fox-coloured hair. People—the fanciful kind, prone to lurid metaphors—say it matched the flames that swallowed her up after a charge of witchcraft and a quick trial. Her daughter is spared the same fate and carted off to an aunt in the countryside. Lord de Vries remarries within the month.

Here is the secret Tissaia carries: a birthmark like a wine-stain, broad as a woman’s outstretched hand over her heart. Her mother had one just like it. It’s the only inheritance she’s ever wanted. She loses it the night her education at Aretuza ends.

-

  
“Let the girls keep some insignificant ugliness, if they request it. Scars, blemishes, that sort of thing,” Tissaia tells Giltine. The weight on their shoulders is heavy, the young rectoress shepherding her first class through their Ascension and the mage too clumsy at politics, too loud about his talents, to thrive at Ban Ard. 

“One could say that’d call my skills into question,” he says, a little huffy.

“One could say that a flaw adds character to the work,” Tissaia counters. “If one were the sort to natter away about art.”

She will not explain that one can love ugliness as fiercely as beauty. And she doubts that many girls will take up this small opportunity, this absence of sacrifice, that she’s offering them. She just lets her gaze—pitiless and blue and nothing like her mother’s—bore into him.

He flinches. Of course he does.

“As you say, Madam de Vries.”

* * *

**iv. Fringilla**

Fringilla knows precisely how lucky she is.

Half the girls at Aretuza disappear like stones beneath dark water within their first year. The ones that remain are cast-offs, bartered away by families that never loved them or quickly forgot what little love they had.

And here she sits, in a very fancy Gors Velen café with a dessert smelling of whipped cream and rosehips that her Uncle Artorius bought for her, about to weep.

She’s never been much good at schooling her features. Her lower lip is _definitely_ wobbling. Oh, and here come the tears. She swipes at her cheeks with an Aretuza-blue sleeve and tries not to hiccup wetly.

“Oh dear.” Uncle Artorius guest-lectures at Ban Ard. His seminar is called _Theoretical Mutagens in Extant Species_ and through it, he’s probably interacted with a teenager. Once or twice. Still, his expression is one of mortal terror. “What’s all this?”

“They don’t like me. I don’t have any f _riends_ ,” she wails. 

Uncle Artorius recognizes familiar ground: a proposition that can be supported or dismissed with evidence. “Why do you think so?” he says.

“I _froze_ a _cat_. They think I’m some sort of monster,” she says. It doesn’t matter how much she insists that the thing was menacing the baby chicks her sister loves. Her yearmates can tell that she isn’t as sorry as she ought to be.

“A girl in your class, ah, altered her mother’s appearance,” Uncle Artorius observes. And isn’t that a terrifying proposition: the sorcerers on their distant councils discussing all of their conduit moments?

“Sabrina? Yes, but she’s mean and fun and pretty. Everyone wants her to like them.”

“You’re a very nice young lady. And your mother, I’m told, was a great beauty in her day.” Uncle Artorius says it as if he’s read about the feminine virtues in a treatise. Fringilla wonders if he tried to help her father court her mother, and if so, how her parents ever managed to get married.

She could say something about her arm, Fringilla thinks, withered and grotesque beneath its tidy glove. A fitting appendage for a girl nobody trusts. When she tries to form the words, she stops herself. She knows that she’ll scream, right here in this pretty little restaurant, packed with people enjoying their tea. And Uncle Artorius will start lecturing her about tissue desiccation or—or the transitive properties of chaos, and it’ll be of no help at all.

She wipes her face on the lovely, embroidered napkin, begs her uncle to forgive her silliness, and they have a charming conversation about her botany lectures.

 _Three more years_ , Fringilla thinks. _That’s all I have to endure_.

It isn’t so bad, when she puts it that way.

-

The girl in Fringilla’s looking glass is normal. Pretty, even, with deep, luminous skin and a sweetly open face, framed by loose curls. Her hands are expressive and manicured and utterly nondescript otherwise.

She puts on her silvery dress, the one that felt bright and hopeful when she chose it, and steps out of her cramped little room to enjoy the future she was promised.

* * *

**v. Yennefer**

“Triss?”

It’s late. The lone candle on the nightstand stirs the shadows. Under Triss’s flowery quilt, they’re both loose-limbed from wine and orgasms.

“Mhm, Yenna?” Impending sleep roughens Triss’s voice but Yennefer presses on. She wants, suddenly and violently, to be reassured that she isn’t alone. And she can only bear to have this conversation when they’re both hazy, so she can deny its weight in the morning.

“What did they change about you? In Aretuza?”

Triss rolls over to face her, fully awake now. “They healed my lungs,” she says, matter-of-fact.

Yennefer is surprised by how much that hurts. Of course Triss—sweet, pretty Triss, who giggles easily and has no dark corners in her heart—needed to Ascend the way a wound needs stitching. It must have been no sacrifice at all. “Only that?” she says, trying to keep her voice even.

“My freckles were a point of contention. Tissaia sided with me and let them stay, in the end,” Triss admits.

That startles a horrified laugh out of Yennefer. “Fuck. Are those a blemish upon our vaunted profession?”

“You tell me.”

She takes that as an invitation and buries her face in Triss’s freckly tits. It’s wonderful, all soft skin and the lingering scent of herbal soap, an eager pulse thrumming beneath.

“You coming up for air anytime soon?”

Yennefer turns her head sulkily. “No. I live here now.”

Triss shrugs and begins rubbing circles on Yennefer’s scalp with her precise fingers. The thing is, she’s not unobservant. She won’t drop the topic just because Yennefer plays cute. “I was one of those girls, you know. The ones so doomed that their parents give them away without question. I can’t regret it,” Triss says, right on cue. Her tone isn’t contrarian, Yennefer decides, but utterly convinced. “What about you, Yenna? Do you regret it?”

“Of course not,” she bites out. The ache in her voice is honest; the words are not. “What use is a crooked little thing to anyone?”

“That’s not true. Want to hear about my embarrassing crush on you? The one I caught as soon as I saw you?”

Yennefer snorts, not unkindly. “That’s because you’re… soft-hearted.”

“You were going to say _soft in the head_ ,” Triss gasps, her eyes theatrically enormous. “We have some very nice sex and some okay wine and then my darling _insults_ me. You have to be the big spoon now or I’ll never forgive you.”

“Fine, fine,” Yennefer grumps, rolling behind Triss and pulling her close. The space between them is so small that it can’t be measured but, as Triss’s breathing settles into sleep and the fickle light dances, Yennefer suspects it’s as vast as the sea.

**Author's Note:**

> Anyone else still mad that we never got that deleted scene where Yennefer's graduating class talks about their respective transformations? Because that's my entire motivation for this fic, with bonus Triss and a Keira cameo. Because I love them, Your Honour.


End file.
